Healthy Competition: Product Marketing | Competitive Intelligence | Strategy · Andy McCotter-Bicknell

Finding Your Dream Job in Product Marketing or Competitive Intelligence w/ Yi Lin Pei

·40 min·2 clips

Treat your job search like product marketing for yourself: you are the product.

1. Healthy Competition: Product Marketing | Competitive Intelligence | Strategy focuses on finding a dream job in product marketing and competitive intelligence with Yi Lin Pei. 2. Yi Lin Pei is the guest, a former product marketer and current coach who helps PMMs get jobs, succeed in their first two years, and move into leadership. 3. The episode asks how a civil engineer who became a PMM coach now helps job seekers navigate a tighter market. 4. Yi Lin Pei says she studied civil engineering for both her bachelor's and master's degrees before working six years in transportation engineering. 5. She describes a business-school moment when a marketing class made her realize she wanted the creative side that engineering lacked. 6. She says her first tech marketing role came at Autodesk as a content marketing manager after repeated rejections from other employers. 7. She explains that shadowing product managers and talking to product marketers helped her move into product marketing within six months. 8. She says she later worked at three startups and built product marketing teams from scratch twice as a lead product marketer. 9. She says friends laid off during COVID asked for help and that their job successes pushed her toward formal coaching. 10. She says she started coaching as a side hustle about two and a half years ago before leaving full-time work earlier this year. 11. She says her coaching now centers on job search help, early-career success, and leadership opportunities for women and women of color. 12. She says the market moved from a COVID hiring bump to a reversal with layoffs and more employer leverage. 13. She says layoffs are slowing, summer hiring is weaker, and fall should look better than the current period. 14. She says experienced PMMs who once had multiple offers may now face five to 10 times more competition for one opening. 15. She says career switchers face an even harder path because they lack direct product marketing experience. 16. She says strong targeting and strong positioning are the main ways to stand out in today's search. 17. She says job seekers should think like PMMs and focus on companies where they have a competitive advantage. 18. She says interview answers should use her modified STAR framework: process, situation, action, and results. 19. She says the conversation is practical, advice-heavy, and centered on job search tactics, referrals, and negotiation. 20. People focused on PMM hiring, referrals, and compensation strategy will get the most from it; people wanting deep technical product marketing theory may skip it.

As heard by us

A grounded PMM career story that turns networking and persistence into usable job-search advice.

This conversation follows an unusual career path: civil engineering to product marketing, then into helping other product marketers and competitive-intel people think through fit and role changes. That background gives the discussion a clear throughline without dressing it up.

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Why you'd press play

You want a career pivot story that goes from civil engineering and transportation engineering into product marketing.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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